Bulls can’t stand up to Lakers

I reached Rose Watch about a minute into the third quarter. If I were one who thought the Bulls were title contenders, this would be alarming. But I don’t. I never like it when the third quarter arrives and the only thing that holds my interest is Derrick Rose, but the Lakers are really good. When the Bulls play a team like the Lakers, who have this many favorable match-ups on their roster, expecting more can only lead to disappointment.

Like I mentioned in the preview, the Bulls’ best hope to escape with a victory was a stubborn Kobe who’d rather work on his post game while Pau Gasol looked for something to do. This didn’t happen at all; in fact, Kobe played most of the game on the opposite end of the selfish, stubborn ass spectrum. The TNT broadcast showed a graphic in the first quarter that showed Kobe averaged over 10 shots in the first quarter in the first 11 games; on Thursday, he took only four shot in the first. His only barrage of shots came in the second quarter while Gasol rested.

If the Lakers weren’t going to self-destruct, it was hard to come up with ways the Bulls could win this game. One thing yesterday’s preview didn’t mention at all is that the Lakers are crazy tall. The Lakers looked like a middle school team whose entire roster is walking around with muscles, armpit hair and acne, while their opponents are still a year or two away from puberty. Back to the middle school analogy, the Lakers big men look like they went through puberty and skipped all the awkward stages. Gasol, Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom are freaks, and regardless of whether you think Joakim Noah is an All-Star or not, the Bulls don’t have an answer for those three guys.

Not much else to say about this one, but here’s a few quick notes:

1. Derrick Rose was true to his word and was more aggressive. In the first quarter he settled for jumpers, but pushed the ball on every Bulls’ rebound. His willingness to attack the basket increased as the game went along, and if you’re attacking the wall of 7-footers on the Lakers than you’re being aggressive. In the second half, some shots started falling and Rose took even more control the ball and played a bigger role in the Bulls’ offense than just making the first pass.

1. Let me know if you guys felt the same way, but I didn’t even think of the “Phil Jackson going against his former team” angle of this game until the fourth quarter. Not that TNT played this up or that anyone should really care about such trivial things, but before Marv Albert mentioned this at the beginning of the fourth quarter, the thought never spent a second in my head. I’m not searching for some deeper meaning or asking myself questions like, “Is Phil Jackson more known as a Laker or a Bull?” Just thought it was interesting.